The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  “I checked into a hotel. I went to an apothecary—they still had such things in Budapest—and bought a cut-throat razor. I went to another shop and bought tape. I took the metro over to the Buda Hills, where Lovas had his flat. I found it, no problem. I even rang the intercom and put on a funny voice and asked him if the woman of the house was in. ‘She died five years ago. Who is this?’ I said I was a member of the local Party committee for Senior Activities, and apologized for the mistake. Then I went over to Bodo’s flat in some ugly modern block in Pest. This time there was no intercom. But he answered the door himself: a hunched man around seventy in a dressing gown and wheezing while he smoked a cigarette. Of course he didn’t recognize me. ‘What do you want?’ Is the woman of the house in? ‘She left years ago.’ I said, ‘I’m from the Party committee on Pensioners and we want to see . . .’ and I spun some lie about looking into the needs of the elderly. ‘Well, the woman you want isn’t here . . . but if you want to talk about the needs of the elderly . . . you can come in now and hear an earful.’

  “Now, I hadn’t expected to carry out my plan so quickly—but I did have everything I needed with me, so I let him usher me into his small, depressing flat. Crap furniture, crap wallpaper, a nasty little kitchen, brimming ashtrays, empty bottles of cheap booze.

  ‘So who are you again?’ he asked.

  “I told him my name.

  ‘Kadar . . . like our Party chairman?’ he asked me.

  ‘No . . . Kadar like Miklos Kadar. You remember Miklos Kadar, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m an old man. So many people have come and gone in my life.’

  ‘Yes, but Miklos Kadar must hold a special place in your memory . . . as you executed him in front of his daughter.’

  “By this point we were seated in his little bed-sitting room. I opened the bag. I pulled out the shotgun. He gasped, but I put my finger to my lips and he didn’t say another word.

  ‘Surely you must remember his little girl, Margit? You ordered one of your police stooges to keep her eyes open while you lynched him two meters from where she stood.’

  “At that point, he started to feign ignorance. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about . . . I don’t remember such things.’ I hit him on the side of the head with the gun and told him that if he didn’t tell me the truth I’d shoot him on the spot. That’s when he started to cry, to plead, to say how sorry he was, how he was ‘only following orders’ . . . Yes, he actually used that expression.

  “I told him, ‘My mother and I were whisked out of the country afterward and even paid a pittance of a recompense by the government, because they were ashamed of what had happened. So please do not tell me you were only following orders. The cop who held me, he was only following orders—because you barked at him on several occasions when he let me shut my eyes. You, sir, wanted a seven-year-old girl to witness her father’s death. You wanted that scene burned on my memory forever. You succeeded. I’ve spent the ensuing decades trying to wipe that image away—but it simply will never leave me . . . a trauma which you inflicted on me out of sheer malice and cruelty—’

  ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ he cried. ‘I was so wrong. But they were terrible times and—’

  “That’s when I hit him again on the head and ordered him to sit down at his kitchen table. The fool complied. When I told him to lay his hands flat down on the table, he didn’t resist . . . even though he could have made a break for it when I had to put down the gun to start taping him. I used three rolls of tape—making certain he couldn’t move his arms and couldn’t get out of the chair.

  “When I had finished I said, ‘You dare to tell me, “They were terrible times.” You were one of the perpetrators of those terrible times. You were an essential part of a repressive regime—against which men like my father had the courage to raise their voice. And how did you respond to his criticisms of your tyrannical methods? You strung him up in front of his daughter and forced her to watch him jerk and twist as he slowly strangled to death. How can you justify such a thing? How?’

  “He didn’t answer. He just sat there weeping. Much later, I was certain the reason why he didn’t put up a fight when I started taping him down was not just because of the gun within reach of me. It was also because part of him knew he merited this . . . that what he had done was so monstrous he deserved a terrible retribution.”

  “But what you did to him . . . that wasn’t monstrous?”

  “Of course it was. And after I wound the tape around his mouth and head—ensuring that he couldn’t scream or breathe—I did tell him, ‘In a few moments, you will wish I’d shot you and ended your life quickly.’ Then I reached into my bag and pulled out the razor and opened it and severed his right thumb. It’s not easy, severing a finger. You have to work your way through bone and tendon and—”

  “Enough,” I said.

  “I told you, if you don’t sit through my story you don’t get to hear the truth—”

  “The truth? You expect me to believe there’s any truth to any of this?”

  “Where are you right now, Harry? In some dream?”

  “I haven’t a fucking idea anymore . . .”

  “In dreams you might get your hand cut, but it doesn’t bleed. This is real. It’s simply a different version of real. But again, you’re interrupting my story. And until I finish the story—”

  “You’re sick, you know that?”

  “Sick because I cut off all of Bodo’s fingers? Without doubt, it was a sick thing to do. Even through the tape around his mouth I could hear his screams. But I was very systematic. Every finger on his right hand. A short pause. Every finger on his left hand. Then I started on his eyes. The police were wrong, by the way. I didn’t gouge them out. I simply sliced across them. You remember that Buñuel exercise in surrealism: Un chien andalou, where a woman gets her eye cut by a razor. It approximated that. And yes, you can think me mad and twisted for inflicting such horror . . . but surely you can grasp the madness that overtakes someone when they have been so wronged that—”

  “Don’t try to justify it. Don’t.”

  “I’m trying to justify nothing, Harry. I am simply relating to you what happened.”

  “Did it settle the score? Did doing that to Bodo in any way make you feel better about your father’s death?”

  “At the time, all I could think was, Do what you must do . . . Be systematic . . . Then get out of this dreadful country. So after blinding Bodo, I made a small incision in the side of his throat—to let him slowly bleed to death . . . though within moments I could hear gurgling and gasping behind his taped nose and mouth: a sign that he was starting to drown in his own blood. I had packed a spare set of clothes in the bag—so it was the same drill as with Dupré. I stripped everything off and had a shower. Only this time, I cleaned up all the evidence. I wanted everyone in France to know what I did. I also wanted everyone to know in Hungary . . . but only after I was out of the country. So I scrubbed down every surface I touched and bundled up my bloody clothes and waited until Bodo was no longer gasping and gagging.

  “Then I left and took the metro back across the city to Buda. I returned to the shop where I had purchased the duct tape and bought four more rolls. I walked over to Lovas’s apartment and rang his bell. He said, ‘Go away, I want to see nobody.’

  “I said, ‘But I am the woman from the Party’s senior services. I have come with a special present for you. You must let me deliver it.’

  “Once I had talked myself inside his apartment and revealed who I was and brought out the gun, he began to scream. I told him to shut up, but he kept screaming. That’s when I slammed him on the head with the gun. It knocked him out cold. I taped him down, I gagged him as I had done with Bodo. But just as I started working on him, there was a banging at the door. It was some neighbor who’d evidently heard his screaming, as she kept shouting, ‘Mr. Lovas, are you all right? Is someone there with you?’ If I had been sensible, I would have cut his throat right there and hightailed it ou
t of the kitchen window—his apartment was on the ground floor. But I wasn’t sensible. I was deranged. So deranged that I convinced myself I had to dismember all of his fingers and blind him as well. The pain caused Lovas to wake up when I was cutting off his right pinky, and I’d been sloppy when it came to taping his mouth, as I left a small gap. So he started to scream again. The neighbor heard this and told him she was going to call the police. But I still didn’t make a run for it. I just continued my grim work—”

  “You wanted to get caught—”

  “I don’t know what I wanted at the time. When you’re deranged you don’t think logically. You just tell yourself, Get the next finger off . . .”

  “Jesus . . .”

  She smiled and lit up a cigarette.

  “It gets worse. The police arrived. They pounded on the door, demanding to be let in. I worked super-fast, making certain all his fingers were severed. By this time, their pounding was replaced with the boom-boom sound of a battering ram they were using against the door. As it began to give, I grabbed Lovas by the hair. As soon as the door burst open and the cops fell in, I cut his jugular. Then, as they watched in complete horror, I drew the razor across my own throat.”

  “And then?”

  “And then . . . I escaped arrest, detention, trial, and probable execution by a regime I loathed.”

  “By dying?”

  “Yes. I died.”

  Silence. She continued to puff on her cigarette.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Death is death.”

  “Which means?”

  “I no longer existed in a temporal form.”

  “But what happened after you died?”

  Another smile. Another deep lungful of smoke.

  “That I cannot say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . I can’t.”

  “The cops showed me your death certificate. And you yourself have confirmed that you slit your throat and you died. So why . . . why . . . are you here?”

  “Because I am.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. How can I believe you when I know what you’re telling me is impossible?”

  “Since when has death ever made sense, Harry?”

  “But you’ve been there. You know.”

  Another smile.

  “True—and I’m saying nothing.”

  “You have to tell me—”

  “No, I don’t. And no . . . I won’t. Any more than I have to explain my work on your behalf.”

  “Your work on my behalf. Now I know you are insane.”

  “Think what you like, my sweet. But consider this: every person who has recently done harm to you has, in turn, been punished.”

  “You ran over Brasseur outside the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “How else do you run a man down? I got into a car that I borrowed on the street. A Mercedes C-Class—not the best Mercedes, but still a car with considerable kick. I waited for him to emerge from Le Sélect. When he stepped off the pavement, I hit the accelerator and ran right into him.”

  “He said he couldn’t see the driver, but he thought it was a woman.”

  Another smile.

  “And you cornered Omar when he was on the toilet?” I asked.

  “You were right about him. His shit truly stank. And I’ll let you in on a small revolting secret: when he wiped himself he only used a minimal amount of paper, so the shit was everywhere on his hands. A disgusting bastard. And I’d seen how he had treated you, how he left that communal toilet in such a grim state—”

  “You saw? How?”

  She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

  “Do you know what I like best about being dead? You can smoke without guilt.”

  “But even in death you still age, just like the rest of us.”

  “Yes, that is rather ironic, don’t you think? But that’s how it works . . . for me, at least.”

  “And the others?”

  A shrug.

  “So you didn’t go to heaven after you—?”

  “Killed myself? Hardly.”

  “To hell then?”

  “I went . . . nowhere. And then, somehow, I was back here. I was ten years older, but the apartment was here . . .”

  “Who paid the bills?”

  “Before I left for Hungary, I saw my lawyer and told him to set up a trust with the money I received as compensation from Dupré. I left my estate to no one. And I made certain in my will that no one could sell the apartment from under me. You see, I knew what I was going to do in Budapest . . . and I also knew that I would have to disappear for a very long time afterward . . .”

  “So you weren’t planning to kill yourself?”

  “Not until the police burst in. It was a completely impulsive decision. But, like I said, I was crazy then.”

  “And you’re not crazy now? Beating men to death with a hammer—”

  “He kicked the crap out of his wife, and he also threatened to kill you.”

  “That was never established.”

  “I heard it.”

  “When?”

  “In his bar. When he didn’t think I was there.”

  “And Robson?”

  “I asked you what you thought was the worst thing that could befall him. You said—”

  “I didn’t think you’d actually download kiddy porn onto his computer.”

  “It’s what you wanted, Harry. That man systematically destroyed your life. His punishment struck me as . . . apt. His life is now completely shattered. And before the week is out, he’ll take his own life in jail.”

  “Are you going to force him to do that?”

  Another laugh.

  “I am not a spirit who invades the souls of others and forces them to do things.”

  “No—you’re just a succubus.”

  “A succubus has sex with men while they are asleep. You’re very much awake, Harry.”

  “So all this then is . . . what? When I came here yesterday, the apartment was covered in dust, the concierge acted as if I was a lunatic, telling me the place hadn’t been inhabited—let alone cleaned—for years.”

  “You’re not a lunatic. But when you come to visit me every three days, you enter this.”

  “But what is this? And what about everybody else in the building? Do they go into the same sort of trance which the concierge seemed to be in?”

  “Think whatever you like.”

  “I still don’t get it. Why just the three hours? Why just every few days?”

  “Because that’s all I can do . . . all I can take. I want this . . . our little liaison. But only on my terms. That’s why I refused to see you more than our few hours twice a week.”

  “Because that’s all you were allowed?”

  “No one controls me. No one.”

  “But you still loiter with intent every Sunday on the balcony of some dilettante American’s salon, picking up idiots like myself?”

  “You were only the second man I ever picked up there.”

  “Who was the first?”

  “A German named Horst. I met him there in June of ’91. I had just . . . reemerged, so to speak. And I was revisiting places I had been in the past. So, when I found myself back in Paris—eleven years after my death—I decided to try my luck and see what might come of a sojourn on Lorraine’s balcony. I must have lurked there for weeks . . . until Horst saw me. Like you, he was a man in his forties, recently divorced, on his own in Paris, sad, lonely. We chatted. He came to this apartment at the agreed-upon five PM time. We had sex. We drank Scotch. We smoked a few cigarettes. He talked about how his wife had fallen in love with another man, his stalled career as a painter, the lycée where he taught art and how it all bored him, and so forth and so on. All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren’t they? At eight o’clock, I told him he had to leave—but that he’d be welcomed back three days later. He said he’d show up. He never did. After that,
I occasionally ‘returned’ to Lorraine’s balcony, hoping someone might see me. No one did for years. Until you showed up, Harry. You saw me . . . because you wanted to see me.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “You must stop talking about ‘sense’ or the apparent illogicality of our time together. There is no logic to this—except that we are here together because, as I said before, you wanted to see me.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Then why did you keep coming here, dutifully, week after week? Simply for the sex?”

  “That was a big part of it.”

  “You’re right. It was. But there was more to it than that. You needed to see me . . . in every sense of the word. And I needed to put things right for you.”

  “I cannot accept—”

  “Accept, accept. Faith may be the antithesis of proof . . . but you have proof. You. Me. Here. Now.”

  “You don’t exist.”

  “I do exist . . . as much as you exist. In this room. This moment. This time. This bit of nothingness that is still everything because it’s the instant we share now. You can’t escape that, Harry. Nor should you. It’s the closest you’ve ever come to love in your life.”

  “You have no idea about—”

  “Love? How dare you? I went out of my mind for love. I killed—butchered—for love. I have far too many ideas about love . . . and I also know it’s like everything else in life: it can drive you to the worst extremes, the absolute edge. Yet, in the great scheme of things, it all comes down to a moment here, a moment there . . . and a flicker of connection with someone else. That’s happiness, Harry. Nothing more.”

  “And what about love for your child?”

  Silence. Then she said, “That’s everything. And you feel you have to kill the person who takes everything away from you.”

  “Did the revenge help balm the wounds?”

  “You mean, do I still relive the sadness and horror of what happened . . . and of what I did? Of course. I still can’t get away from it. It will be with me forever. But I have sought redemption . . . through you.”